In the United States of America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights, covering much the same grounds, during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944. Today, many nations, states, or groups of nations have developed legally binding declarations guaranteeing comprehensive sets of human rights, e.g. the European Social Charter.

These rights are sometimes referred to as "red" rights. They impose upon the government the duty to respect and promote and fulfill them, but this depends on the availability of resources. The duty is imposed on the state because it controls its own resources. No one has the direct right to housing and right to education. (In South Africa, for instance, the right is not, per se, to housing, but rather "to have access to adequate housing,"[6] realised on a progressive basis.[7])

The duty of government is in the realisation of these rights as a positives.

Maurice Cranston argued that scarcity means that supposed second-generation and third-generation rights are not really rights at all.[12] If one person has a right, others have a duty to respect that right, but governments lack the resources necessary to fulfill the duties implied by citizens' supposed second- and third-generation rights.

Dr. Charles Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, has argued that second- and third-generation human rights serve as an attempt to cloak political goals, which the majority may well agree are good things in and of themselves, in the language of rights, and thus grant those political goals inappropriate connotations. In his opinion, calling socio-economic goods "rights" inherently creates a related concept of "duties," so that other citizens have to be coerced by the government to give things to other people in order to fulfill these new rights. He also has stated that, in the US, the new rights create a "nationalization" of political decision-making at the federal level in violation of federalism.[13] In his book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, Dr. Paul Rahe, the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, wrote that focusing on equality-based rights leads to a subordination to the initial civil rights to an ever-expanding government, which would be too incompetent to provide for its citizens correctly and would merely seek to subordinate more rights.[14]

M. de Lamartine wrote me one day: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first half." And, in fact, it is quite impossible for me to separate the word "fraternity" from the word "voluntary." It is quite impossible for me to conceive of fraternity as legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice being legally trampled underfoot.[15]

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Economist F. A. Hayek has argued that the second generation concept of "social justice" cannot have any practical political meaning:

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No state of affairs as such is just or unjust: it is only when we assume that somebody is responsible for having brought it about [...]. In the same sense, a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust. And the idea that things ought to be designed in a "just" manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty.[16]

In any case, the argument from first-generation to second-generation rights was never supposed to be a matter of conceptual analysis. It was rather this: if one is really concerned to secure civil or political liberty for a person, that commitment should be accompanied by a further concern about the conditions of the person's life that make it possible for him to enjoy and exercise that liberty. Why on earth would it be worth fighting for this person's liberty (say, his liberty to choose between A and B) if he were left in a situation in which the choice between A and B meant nothing to him, or in which his choosing one rather than the other would have no impact on his life?"[17]